STATIC

A jittery and sharp-tongued Taiwanese-American woman, Kay grinds away in the gig economy, ferrying drunks around Vegas at night and scrubbing images from the internet during the day.

She’s seen what humanity has to offer and knows there’s nothing worth believing in, not on this planet or anywhere else. Of course she’s resentful: she’d been a star, an Olympic diver whose dreams were cut short by tragedy. But she won’t talk about her past or even tell you her real name. If she did, she might have to explain why her daughter hated her—and why she sometimes sees an old man falling from the sky.

Now her daughter is on the radio, claiming responsibility for the sound that haunts a superstore. As Kay searches for the source of Carly Dee’s voice, she will become a fugitive, drawn into bizarre rituals and the glare of television cameras. This cynical woman who spent her life keeping her head down, believing in nothing, will find herself becoming a leader. But if she wants to save her new community, she’ll need to face her past—and atone.

cf. Michelle Yeoh, Joan Chen

A chatty priest from New Orleans with a smile that could charm the devil, Father Jim is beloved by his community—and he loves being their leader. After encountering pure evil as a child, he’s spent fifty years on the righteous path, and he knows he’s right with God. He’d always imagined that if the moment ever came, he’d be first in line to receive divine judgment, and he would do it with his eyes cast up to heaven, ready to take his place in the drama of the ancients. But now the Lord has played him for a fool, leaving him writhing in torment while others experienced holy ecstasy.

Although his faith has been shattered, Father Jim will pick up the pieces, the few he can find anyway, and he will conjure a new and better God, one who guides him to a new flock in the most unlikely of places. And he will transform an old sitcom into a gospel that will lead him towards the very evil that fascinated him as a boy: a creature in the shadows, swinging a massive mallet and hunting for anything that might bleed.

cf. Matthew Goode, Lee Pace, Jon Hamm

Kay’s daughter had been a happy girl who dreamed of seeing her name in lights. But she was forever changed the night an otherworldly sound filled her head on a remote Iowa road. When her mother denied it happened, Carly Dee ran away as soon as she could, determined to find some answers. Instead, she found a career as an avant-garde rock-n-roller who invented “celestial metal” and became a one-hit-wonder with a song about how “you can hear better in the dark.” But if she’s remembered at all these days, it’s only as “the girl in the car” when a beloved actor-turned-politician plowed his Cadillac into a boulder, killing them both.

Some of her die-hard fans think she’s the voice on the radio, the mysterious woman known as the Voice of the Red Rocks who hijacked the airwaves and predicted the cosmic sound that tore up a Vegas superstore. She’s being hailed as a prophet, even if she died six years ago. Is she a ghost in the machine, leading the desperate and damaged into a dangerous new faith? Is she really causing the lights of Vegas to flicker? Carly Dee is our Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the riddle in the shadows that will draw her mother up the river into a confrontation that might turn out the lights for good.

cf. Gemma Chan, Greta Lee, Dichen Lachman

“You’ll never know what time it is!” Cut to a mischievous grin as sixteen-year-old Tanner Whitney delivers his famous catchphrase on Family Therapy, the sitcom everyone knows, even if they never watched it intentionally. Whitney was a child star who became a national sensation when he traded the soundstage for the soapbox, summoning the energy of Bobby Kennedy on cocaine as he beamed before rapt crowds who chanted, “We know what time it is!” Then he met a notorious musician named Carly Dee. Later that night, his car was found wrapped around a boulder in the desert.

The tragic end of Tanner Whitney’s life has transformed him into a myth. But some folks refuse to let him go. That wasn’t his body, they say. The funeral was a deep-fake. Every Sunday night, they gather in the desert to reenact Whitney’s last moments and marvel at the airbag that, like the Veil of Veronica, bears an imprint of his face.

And then one night, an odd priest interrupts this ritual and begins to reshape Whitney’s image—and the footage from his TV show—into a frightening weapon in a war against God.

cf. James Marsden, Michael Ealy, Henry Cavill